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Daily Digest: 7 September 2009

This morning's round-up of the GP and other health stories making the headlines.

Welcome to Pulse's Daily Digest, a quick news round-up of what health and GP news is making the headlines this morning.

The Daily Mail leads today with ‘Alzheimer's: a massive leap', claiming that British scientists have made the biggest breakthrough for more than 15 years in Alzheimer's research. A Nature Genetics study of 16,000 DNA samples – also reported widely elsewhere, including by the BBC, the Guardian and the Telegraph – has uncovered potentially key genes linked to the disease.

A front-page story in the Guardian claims that the NHS will not be spared from the big public spending cuts touted by ministers over the weekend. According to the paper's anonymous Cabinet source, ‘there was no logic to excluding the health and international development budgets from restraint.' Official confirmation of how the Government plans to tackle the budget deficit will be given in the autumn pre-budget report, we're told.

An inquest into the case of a Devon man who died from necrotising fasciitis (or as it's universally known on Fleet Street, a ‘flesh-eating bug') is reported by a number of papers, including the Sun and the Daily Mail.

A couple of stories from the weekend worth mentioning. The Sunday Telegraph reported what it described as 'Labours secret plan to send overweight children to NHS fat camps'. New guidance to PCTs apparently means that from this month pupils whose weight is too high, or too low, will automatically be offered a referral to ‘weight management services' in areas where they have already been set up or can be set up quickly.